Boris Johnson says UK must put British troops on the ground in Ukraine now to ‘flip a switch” in Putin’s head

Boris Johnson has called on the UK and its allies to immediately ‘put their shoes on the ground’ in Ukraine to turn the switch on Vladimir Putin.

The former Prime Minister said there is no reason why we should not deploy non-combat troops to support Ukraine now if we plan to do so as the ultimate peacekeeper.

Johnson, who was Prime Minister during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, also admitted he regretted not doing more to help Ukraine.

He said: ‘If we have a plan to have military units on the ground after the war, after Putin has condescended to a ceasefire, then why wouldn’t we do it now?’

He said the government’s current plan to form a ‘coalition of the willing’ with its allies to provide forces to maintain peace and stability in Ukraine is not enough, as this can only be achieved if a peace agreement is concluded.

And he acknowledged that it would ‘flip a switch’ in Putin’s mind if forces from Britain and other European allies moved into safe havens in Ukraine, rather than waiting for a ceasefire that ‘of course puts all the initiative and all power in Putin’s hands’.

“There is no logical reason for me to understand why we should not send peaceful ground forces there to show our support, our constitutional support, for a free, independent Ukraine,” he added.

Last year Putin warned that any allied troops deployed would be a ‘legitimate target’, but Johnson said it was Ukraine’s decision, not Putin’s.

Johnson, who became Prime Minister when Russia invaded Ukraine nearly four years ago, also admitted he regretted not doing more to help Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces launched an overnight attack on a major Russian missile facility

‘This is a political thing. It’s about whether Ukraine is a free country or not. If it is a state dependent on Russia, which Putin wants, then of course it is up to Putin to decide who will come to his country. If not, then it’s up to the Ukrainians to decide.’

And he said the West had ‘enabled’ the initial invasion and could have prevented it altogether if it had taken note of Putin’s increasing aggression and failed to act when it annexed Crimea in 2014 during David Cameron’s premiership.

Claiming ‘the general ambiguity of the Western position’ had harmed Ukraine, he said: ‘If we’d had clarity and simplicity about Ukraine, rather than endless fudge and obscurity, we could have saved that, we could have prevented that invasion.’

In an in-depth interview with the BBC, which will be broadcast tomorrow, he also criticized the measure which “cost lives and caused delays in helping Ukrainians who play into Putin’s hands”.

‘We always postponed it unnecessarily,’ he said.

‘We then gave the Ukrainians what they wanted, and in fact it was always in their favor and against Putin.

‘So the only person harmed by the escalation is Putin.’

Interviewing former army chief Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, who called on the government to ‘untie’ its pledge at last year’s NATO summit to spend 3.5 per cent of national income on defense by 2035, Radakin told Laura Kuenssberg: ‘It was tragic that nothing was done in Crimea’ and suggested Putin was increasingly ’emboldened’ by what he saw as Western weakness.

“I think Putin was encouraged by the West’s failure to punish Assad for using chemical weapons in Syria,” he said in an interview to be broadcast tomorrow morning.

‘I think Putin was further encouraged by what he saw in Afghanistan in February 2022 and the general sense that the West was falling behind.

‘He had seen those horrific photos of Americans being forced to flee Afghanistan and Britain being pulled out, and that really encouraged him.’

Unofficial Ukrainian military blogs said Ukrainian-made long-range Flamingo drones attacked a missile-producing facility

A rescuer walks in front of an apartment building hit by a Russian airstrike in the town of Komyshuvakha, Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine February 20, 2026

Johnson and Sir Tony also agreed that Western allies were too slow to act in the early days of the war when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and over months it often took time for allies to agree to send the weapons President Volodymyr Zelensky had requested.

Sir Tony described the allies’ approach as ‘incrementalism’ and said Ukraine felt it had been ‘very slow and extremely frustrating, these tensions have been there from the beginning’.

And Johnson, a one-time foreign secretary and prime minister, admitted: ‘I think we need to do more.’

He warned that Putin would “keep going” unless he saw evidence of the West’s “determination” to end the war.

‘The real problem with Ukraine is that Putin does not yet believe or is convinced that the West sees Ukraine as a free and independent European country as a huge strategic goal.

‘This is the problem we are in. This stems from a lack of fundamental determination.’

Meanwhile, calling on Sir Keir Starmer to fulfill his ‘international commitment’ to increase defense spending, Sir Tony said:

‘The reason for this commitment was that there was a war in Europe. Russia is weak but dangerous. We made this commitment. NATO challenges us. ‘Where is our plan?’

And he warned: ‘We need to invest in each of these to reassure our nation that we will continue to be safe in the 2030s. That’s why we conducted a defense review.

‘So NATO has mobilized around an operational plan and the need for more spending, and this needs to be resolved.’